Service First: How CRM Enables Proactive Customer Support, Solving Issues Before They Arise

Customer support reps have seen it all. System troubleshooting, questions about warranty terms, installation, and where to find the on/off switch—you name it, they’ve helped fix it. They’re middle-of-the-night, last-minute-before-the-conference-call lifesavers, and to your company, they’re superheroes.

What if, however, they could help customers locate and diagnose issues before they even arose, preventing those eleventh hour headaches? The good news is, with a proven CRM system, they can. Now, support is turning from responsive to preventative and proactive – helping your teams respond quicker, and with greater accuracy, than ever before. According to Salesforce’s new 2015 State of Analytics Report, which gathers knowledge from 1,900 industry leaders worldwide, the majority of top performing teams are able to predict customer support issues before they arise more than 80 percent of the time.

Smarter Routing: Better Rep Matches Mean Quicker Service

So how do they do it? They’re smart about how they approach support, and they leverage the latest technology to tap into the most pressing issues affecting their customers today. One key initiative that helps them best the competition: they carefully select and assign service agents to specific issues they’re most equipped to support. With Salesforce Service Cloud’s Omnichannel Presence and Routing feature, cases and leads are instantly routed to the appropriate agent, automatically determined by a variety of factors, including employee skill set, availability, and their capacity to handle incoming work. When any factor changes, employees are able to update their status in real-time, ensuring no case slips through the cracks.

Optimized Call Center Management: Engaging Across the IoT

Another way reps can proactively respond to customer issues is by optimizing the call routing experience. Now, thanks to the Internet of Things (IoT), a service “call” can take many forms—think text message, online chat, even a Facebook post, determined by each organization’s setup. To this end, the Service Cloud allows omnichannel requests to funnel into a centralized dashboard, known as the Lightning Console, for easy, up-to-the-minute updates on requests, no matter how they arrive. This way, call center management is exponentially expanded, and so is the opportunity to connect.

Tailored Content: The Power of Personalization

When customers call (or tweet, e-mail, you name it) for support, they expect the associate to be familiar with their case history. Long pauses while your reps look through silos of data and disparate legacy systems to recover customer information are not only awkward, they indirectly relay that the client was forgotten, and that’s never a message anyone wants to send—or receive. As soon as a request comes into Service Cloud, all account details are available with it, including the customer’s profile, purchasing history, and account information. This not only saves valuable time, it helps agents anticipate the needs of each caller, helping them solve issues quicker, with a more personalized and tailored response.

Real-time Analytics: Uncovering Trends for Quicker Response

One of the best ways to stay one step ahead of support issues? Capturing data and analyzing it to uncover patterns, histories, and movements. Now, with the integration of Service Cloud and Salesforce Wave Analytics, your reps can do just that. From checking agent efficiency to examining data from multiple sources (including operational insights from Salesforce and other systems, such as CTI or web analytics) then comparing it against traditional performance metrics to uncover underlying trends, they’re equipped with the tools they need to anticipate issues before they arise—then quickly respond.

These days, it (literally) pays to be prepared, and the fastest way to ensure you’re ready to respond to anything? Incomparable organization. Proven CRM systems such as Salesforce help service agents transform stored, incoming, and future customer issues from stressful to manageable—superhero cape optional.

Sources:

“It’s The Dawn of Proactive Customer Service. Are You Ready?” Salesforce UK, November 4, 2015, https://www.salesforce.com/uk/blog/2015/11/its-the-dawn-of-proactive-customer-service-are-you-ready.html?d=70130000000i7MP.

“Salesforce Service Cloud,” http://www.salesforce.com/service-cloud/overview/.

Tokara Solutions

As President and founder of Tokara Solutions, Shawn Grant has over 20 years of experience in enterprise CRM design and delivery. Shawn remains instrumental in providing CRM and Marketing Automation products and services for companies in the Financial Services, Manufacturing, Public Utilities, Home Builders/Real Estate Services, and Land Title Industry. Consequently, he continues to look forward to providing his knowledge within the CRM industry by writing for our company blog. From integration to implementation, Shawn’s unmatched CRM experience provides us with exceptional insight through Tokara Solutions’ blogs.

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